In this blog: I see what the British left behind, visit the slums of Mumbai, and see the most expensive house in the world.
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| 6 months on the road... the route so far. Large map here |
So first of all, a brief side note in that my arrival in Mumbai marked six months on the road. I'd like to say it's been awful, terrible, the worst experience of my life. But obviously I can't. I'm thoroughly enjoying the amazing experiences, unique sights and various wonderful people I meet, all often at unexpected moments. Sure, occasionally it feels a bit pointless, and making every decision on your own can be a bit draining, but it's all character building. I've learnt a lot about the countries and places I've been to, as well as assorted history I probably should have learnt at school, and have a broader understanding of the rights and wrongs of the world. And it goes without saying it's been a lot of fun! India itself has been a surprise as well; much more tolerable than expected, and full of excitement, chaos, and life. In fact the two months I expected to spend here have long come and gone, and I'll be here at least another month.
It's been a rollercoaster - but a good one - lots of excitement with the odd moment of feeling sick.
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I'd been a bit apprehensive about visiting Mumbai, but it took a while to actually realise this until I realise I'd been putting off visiting. I wanted to go but at the same time I didn't, I guess I had preconceptions that it was a huge overcrowded city, gridlocked, full of slums, dirty, noisy and unpleasant. In fact, it had elements of all of the above, but is overwhelmingly a modern, clean and developed metropolis and the source of half of India's tax income thanks to being the finance centre. In fact it turned out to be quite an endearing place, and I ended up quite liking it.
I arrived in the city mid-morning on a sleeper bus though can't say I was able to sleep a lot, and experienced straight-off the gridlock I'd heard about. Like Manhattan, a lot of the city is built on a peninsula, with too many people and cars in too small an area, and also like Manhatten were the hundreds of skyscrapers present, often surprisingly modern. Contrasting with this, the mass slums in various areas were also very apparent. It struck me straight away I was about to experience a very different India.
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| The commuter trains at a quieter time of day |
It was a lovely warm morning thanks to being much further south, and with the bus stopping far uptown, I took the urban train further south to the affluent Colaba district, witnessing packed commuter trains travelling with people hanging out of the wide doors that are left open all the time, a striking sight that took me back to Slumdog Millionaire which was filmed here. Partly thanks to people falling out said doors, Mumbai rail is the most dangerous in the world with a shocking 2,700 people dying every year - nearly ten every day. Property prices, and therefore accommodation prices are high in Mumbai, so once in the Colaba area I ended up taking a tiny windowless room on a fifth floor backstreet building, which sounds grim but was actually very clean and tidy so I didn't mind too much. Except for the urinal blocks they liked to put in the communal bathroom sinks to keep them fresh, which made me want to vomit every time I brushed my teeth. What a strange idea.
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I went for a stroll round the local area, which was cleaner, much less chaotic and generally more 'normal' than I've been used to of late - one of the most obvious differences being that there were actually pavements to walk on. Oh the little things. I reached the waterfront and saw the Arabian Sea for the first time, a refreshing feeling when you've not seen the sea for a good couple of months. A shoeless child of about seven followed me along the waterfront begging for money, the most persistent I've yet encountered - but as mentioned before it's not wise to give to them, cruel as it sounds, as it encourages dependency on begging, and often the money goes straight to discretly-hidden gang leaders instead of the kids anyway I understand. I passed India gate, an arched monument built by the British long ago, and beside this, the luxurious Taj Mahal Hotel where the devastating Mumbai terrorist attacks happened in 2008. I stopped nearby and tried a Kulfi Falooda - a desert of a soft dough with almonds and cherry, drizzled in pomegranate seeds and milk, pretty nice.
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| British colonial architecture - the high court
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Mumbai, or Bombay as it was then, was very important to the British back in the day and consequently retains a lot of relics from the Raj era. I walked to the district known as Fort, passing cricket pitches, grand museums and art galleries, the university, cathedral, fountains, parks, and the old city hall. All of these were crafted from local stone in a hybrid of British and Indian styles, but looked unmistakably British in origin.
That night I met up with Shaun, an Australian who I'd been hanging around with a month or so before in the North Indian town of Rishikesh. We'd got on well and stayed in touch, and fortunately our travelling plans coincided in Mumbai, and so began a few evenings of beer and banter, starting at Leopolds, a place I discovered the next day was one of the other locations of the Mumbai terrorist attacks, oh joy. Lightning never strikes twice in the same place though, or so I hoped. Shaun is a long-term traveller of about eighteen months, and supports himself by doing copywriting for businesses and websites based back in Oz - he can work anywhere in the world as long as he has an internet connection, a dream job some would say.
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Thursday 16th Jan
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| Victoria station |
The next day I took one of the old and characterful Mumbai cabs uptown, and set off around another part of the city. There were more relics of the British Raj - the rather grand Victoria Station which was more like a cathedral inside, some government buildings, the Central Post Office, and Crawford market. The latter was huge, and the speciality here seemed to be pet shops, where cages were stuffed often uncomfortably full of rats, mice, pigeons, cats, dogs, gerbils and brightly coloured birds. Not all together I must add, though that would be quite exciting to see.
Further up the peninsula, I stopped as I walked past a university which was having some sort of games afternoon, and smiled whilst watching them do a tug-of-war competition in, of course a very Indian way. I spent the rest of the late afternoon at Chowpatty beach. It was a surprisingly impressive clean and pleasant stretch of sand, bang in the heart of the city, and was the perfect place to be in the late afternoon sun. Women sat on the sand in saaris and burkas, whilst chai-wallahs walked by carrying kettles continuously chanting 'chai, chai, chai' to the obviously tea-starved public. Not even tea-mad England has a cuppa on the beach.
Chowpatty beach
Mumbai is the home of Bollywood - the Indian film industry, and so there's cinemas everywhere. That evening, with not much nightlife going on locally, me and Shaun went to see Grudge Match, starring Robert de Niro and Sly Stallone, which in fact was American. The first surprise was to find that when you ordered food beforehand, they delivered it to your seat during the film. A great touch. The next was having to stand, along with the rest of the audience at the start, for the Indian National anthem which I decided wouldn't win any awards for catchiness. The cinema itself was fantastic, with a quality of picture and comfort of seat better than anything at home. Interestingly, despite being an American film with the dialogue in English, which many middle and upper-class Indians speak as a first language, it was also subtitled... in English! I guess some find the American accent unclear. Half-way through, the film abruptly stopped, and it was soon apparent it was for an interval. So old-school, I love it. It's funny how something as simple as going to the cinema can be so subtly so different in another country.
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Friday 17th January
Mumbai is sadly associated all over the world with it's slums, and the British-Indian movie Slumdog Mlllionaire gave us all an insight into what they were like. However, like many movies this portrayal was a little skewed as I've since found out.
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| Dharavi Slum from the railway station |
About half the population of Mumbai live on just 6% of the land in such slums, and Dharavi, filming location of said movie, is the largest. In fact it's the second largest slum in Asia. When I first heard a while back that companies do tours of the slums for tourists, I thought it sounded pretty low - turning people's misery into an almost circus-freak-show type attraction. When I looked deeper though, I learnt the company doing the tours aimed to build awareness of the reality of the conditions, gave eighty percent of the profits to community initiatives in the slum, and don't allow photography. It then sounded a bit more dignified and respectful, so inteagued, I decided to go along on one of the tours of Dharavi.
On the half-hour train journey there, I was surprised to see an Indian ladyboy (news to me) poncing around the carriage making strange sounds, then touching people on the shoulder and demanding money, followed by supposedly 'cursing' them if they didn't oblige. Fortunately I was out of range, but it was a peculiar sight to witness. Our tour group arrived at the station right beside the slum, and the thirty-odd people split into groups of seven. Our guide was a local chap and was very good at what he does. He was keen to emphasise that the aforementioned movie portrayed and exaggerated the bad sides of the slum, without pointing out the good sides. Good sides I thought? He led us into the nearest area, where the main business is recycling. All sorts of stuff is recycled, and is mostly done painstainingly and dangerously by hand. Plastic, paint tins, and drugs containers, all ripped apart manually without any safety equipment, and processed by cleaning out, burning off, dousing in chemicals etc, before putting through small electric-powered shredders and crushers, made in the slum. Some of the waste is from India, and some from abroad I understand. After all, those container ships bringing shiny goods from India to Europe can't go back empty, so why not pass our waste onto more desperate and less safety conscious people to deal with eh? The sad way the world works unfortunately, and we're all part of that chain whether we like it or not. You have to admire their ingenuity in making money from nothing, but the conditions these people were working in were pretty dismal. They seem to be tolerated out of a combination of desperation, and the lack of knowing the real consequences, earning each of them between £1.50 - £2 a day (150 - 200 rupees).
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Further on we came across some sewing workshops, where groups of about ten men sat in neatly laid out rooms making shirts. To be fair they looked reasonably content and the conditions didn't appear too bad. A lot was for the local Indian market, though the guide said some items were for Lee Cooper, via a middle man of course. The way that game often works. The surprise was that far from the local population wallowing round in piles of dirt and faeces, the paths round the slum were mostly concreted, everyone had a legal electric and water supply (I say legal - people used to tap in and steal it), there was a market, shoe shops, pharmacy, restaurant, hotel and butchers. We continued into this maze, past a guy being given a cut-throat shave whilst sat on a barrel, then some kids playing on the ground with medical waste.
We were led into the very densely packed residential area, down very dark and narrow paths past houses, ducking below sagging overhead cables, and being careful not to get lost. The houses were almost all brick-built rather than tin shacks, and families mostly lived in single room homes about the same size as the average bathroom at home. Whilst it was obviously a completely inadequate standard of living in this day and age, at least they appeared to live with at least some dignity. The government are slowly doing something about it, bulldozing some areas and rehousing people in tower blocks, though not nearly fast enough. We continued on, looking in a small leather processing factory, watching women making pappadums on baskets laid on the street, kids playing cricket on the edge of a rubbish tip, and a very dirty looking river. We stopped at a community centre and saw the projects the charity was funding and organising which were all very positive.
It was a fascinating tour, though the whole way round I felt as if we shouldn't be there. We were obviously just generally interested, but it felt like they saw us as the rich people looking down our noses. That said, everyone was either friendly or indifferent towards us, so maybe this is just my imagination. Instead of coming away feeling a sense of despair, I saw a real sense of community, people working hard to better themselves, better sanitation than I imagined, and a good basic level of infrastructure. Yes, it all looks a bit inhumane to an outsider, but if you don't know any different do you see it as bad, or just normal?
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| Antilla - a house in the shape of a tower block |
Once the tour had finished, I left the group and in a complete contrast to what I'd just seen, caught the commuter train a few miles south, and walked to a very posh part of town to see Antilla. Worth over US $1bn, Antilla is the most expensive private residence in the world, and owned by the richest man in India. It's hard to believe the two areas I'd visited that day are so close, but such is the diversity of India. Built in 2009, it's been controversial ever since completion, with some saying it's an icon of the city and an inspiration for people to work hard and dream big - 'look what you could achieve'. Others say it's disgusting, and completely insensitive to build such a place when so many people live in such squalid conditions, and I tend to agree with the latter. The easterly windows even look out over Dharavi slum just a few miles away. The whole area was a surprising contrast to the previous two months of India, with Mercs, Golfs, Skodas, Hondas and Beemers cruising around, big posh houses and trees overhanging tidy streets, and I really questioned if I was still in the same country.
Mumbai was a happening place, so more tales follow in a day or two.
